Friday, December 30, 2016

As an experiment, I'm writing a story online, starting with a paragraph I came up with and then incorporating suggestions for what might come next from whoever cares to make them. No idea whether the story will ever be finished.

Here's the original paragraph:

The city had been frozen in time. The moon hung, a thin disk of ice, in
the afternoon sun. Birds were motionless specks in the sky. You could climb the
smoke billowing from its chimneys halfway up to heaven and there discover an
unimaginable nation just an hour's effort above the mundane world.

And here's the continuation, based on yesterday's ideas and suggestions:

Gehenna Immaculata stared at the city from the vantage of the topmost branches of the tallest oak in the adjacent forrest. She had no history or philosophy or even peasant morality to help her put what she saw in context. She was illiterate.She only knew what she wanted.
So now we have a situation and a protagonist. Next up: motivation and action. What does young Gehenna want? Where has she come from? And what does she do next?

I await your input.

And next week...

I'll be switching this over to a weekly post because I have so many other things to celebrate in my life. But it's beginning to look like an interesting exercise, I think. Let's see how far we can take it.

Tuesday, December 27, 2016

So. This "crowdsourcing" thing. Is it any good? I have my doubts. But let's not be hasty.

As an experiment, I'm going to post here the opening paragraph to a story that I came up with just now. I solicit your suggestions for what comes next.

So long as what you guys come up with helps move the thing along, I'll post new segments. When it fails to do so, I'll stop.

I have no more idea than you do what the outcome will be.

Here's the first paragraph:

The city had been frozen in time. The moon hung, a thin disk of ice, in the afternoon sun. Birds were motionless specks in the sky. You could climb the smoke billowing from its chimneys halfway up to heaven and there discover an unimaginable nation just an hour's effort above the mundane world.

Monday, December 26, 2016

Ah, Boxing Day! Decades ago, Marianne and I were in Toronto for Boxing Day immediately before a change in the tax laws that was going to make everything more expensive, starting on January 1. Knowing the world-class shopping event that was about to begin, we slipped out of the city in the early hours of the morning and spent the day in an almost-deserted national park. In the evening, we came back and wandered through empty streets, staring into the windows of shoe stores with exactly three shoes remaining (none mated), clothing stores that were nothing but empty shelves and wire hangars flung to the floor, and similar scenes of commercial desolation. I saw a splash of color on the sidewalk and discovered that somebody had lost a new-bought scarf -- quite a nice one. So I wrapped it around my neck and walked on. I still have that scarf.

There are times -- usually involving shopping or watching television with relatives -- when I suspect that Marianne and I are not Americans at all.

So today we're off to celebrate Boxing Day not the traditional way but our traditional way. By going birding.

And because you deserve something of substance...
I've posted above a photograph of the shadow of a little girl demon, left behind on the sidewalks of Roxborough.

Saturday, December 24, 2016

The snow fell soft and heavy that
Christmas Eve of my long ago youth. The world was so silent you could hear an
angel sigh. My father’s Chevrolet drove slowly and cautiously down Lafountain
Street, the snow before us untouched and the snow behind bearing a single set
of tire tracks, our own.

Every year I remember a little less. So I shall share this
memory with you now, before it fades into oblivion, and me after it.

Christmas is a holy day of obligation. My mother, my father,
and I were on our way to midnight Mass at Saint Stephen’s Church. My older
sister Patty was in nursing school. Mary and Jack were home asleep. Sitting in
the back seat of the car, I was acutely aware of the honor of being allowed up
so late. I could tell my mother was concerned about the state of the roads, but
she said nothing.

The sky was low. The houses we passed were dark. We three
might have been the only people on earth. Yet as we drew closer to the church,
other cars appeared in surprising number and when we arrived, the gravel lot
was filling in fast. Solemnly, we entered the church.

The king of Northumbria was converted to Christianity when a
missionary compared life to a sparrow which has flown out of the night through
a banquet hall window to find itself briefly surrounded by light and warmth and
color and music before flying out the window opposite into darkness and mystery
again. Such is my memory of that Mass, all candles and incense and choir music,
diminished only slightly by my worry that our car might get stuck on the way
home.

Then we were outside again, our breaths white puffs of steam
in the winter air. It was still snowing but during the service somebody had
shoveled out the lot and the entrance to the street. The road, however, was
choked with snow and looked more dangerous than ever. We got into the car and
made our way, sliding slightly, to the street.

Just as we were about to turn, a car came fishtailing down the
hill and lurched to a sudden stop before us. The driver leaned out his open
window, face red and puffy, to drunkenly shout, “Merry Christmas!”

My father rolled down his window and, smiling, called back,
“Merry Christmas to you too, sir!”

That was my father.

That
was my childhood as well, in all its ordinary glory. That was Christmas in Old
Winooski in a time that is fading slowly, inexorably, into the relentless snows
of the past, growing dimmer and harder to see with each passing year. I hope
that your every holiday, whatever you celebrate will, now and always, be every
bit as happy, every bit as rich, and every bit as blessed too.Above: I couldn't find a picture of the interior of St. Stephen's so the interior of St. Francis Xavier, the other Catholic church in Winooski, will have to do. "Christmas in Old Winooski" is copyright 2015 by Michael Swanwick.

Friday, December 23, 2016

Novellas seem to be pretty popular nowadays. Tor has a strong line of them and so does Tachyon Publications. That's one of the latter's up above.

Bruce Sterling has always had a complicated relationship with science fiction. He has a particular brilliance for writing the stuff and a noted loathing for its conventions. This explains much about Pirate Utopia, which is almost not SF and yet should prove eminently satisfactory to genre readers.

The Free State of Fiume was a real thing. Fiume was a port city which was seized by troops led by the Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio. Very briefly, it became an attempted Futurist utopia.

The novella explores this strange phenomenon through the lens of the single worst member of the new government, exposing along the way the seductively poisonous appeal of fascism. At the end, after the inevitable has played out, Harry Houdini appears with two alt-historical pulp writers to implicate science fiction and fantasy literature in the in the whole mess.

It really is quite brilliant.

Tachyon has packaged this story with an introduction by Warren Ellis, a Cast of Characters explaining the historical figures behind the story, an afterword by Christopher Brown, an interview with Sterling himself (by Rick Klaw), and notes on the book's design by John Coulthart. Taken all together, they raise the book to the status of Event.

Coulthart's cover and illustrations must be singled out for particular praise. Based on Fortunato Depero's graphics, they capture the energy and zest of Futurist art and the dangerous appeal that the movement had. I can't think of a better marriage of image and text than here.

Oh, and the postage stamp showing a line of daggers in clenched fists? That was a real thing too.

Monday, December 19, 2016

Important writer though he was, Clifford Simak's novels grew looser and more shambolic as he aged. Highway of Eternity, a book I read recently because it was at hand and I was too sick for anything more serious, is a good example of this. A family of fugitives is hiding in a bubble of time in the Thirteenth Century. They are refugees from One Million Years in the Future. And their names...?

They are David, Emma, Horace, Timothy and Enid. The Evans family. Surprisingly little changes in the next million years, apparently

The plot is a rambling, arbitrary mess. Multiple suspensions of disbelief are required to keep it going. The implications of the enabling technologies are pretty much ignored. Stucturally, Highway of Eternity is a hot mess.

And yet... There are two good bits in it. One comes after Boone, the protagonist, kills an assassin-bot in pre-human North America. As he is surveying the wreckage:

The monster spoke inside his mind.
Mercy, it said.
"The hell with you," said Boone, speaking before astonishment could dry up his speech.
Don't leave me here, the monster pleaded. Not in this wilderness. I did no more than my job. I am a simple robot. I have no basic evil in me.

And later another character, Corcoran, in the far future sees something unexpected:

There was a strangeness about the ridge top -- a faint haziness (...) He slowed his walking, came to a halt, and stood staring up at the haziness that was beginning to assume the form of a gigantic, circular, free-standing staircase winding up the sky.
Then he saw that he was wrong. The staircase was not free-standing; it wound around a massive tree trunk. And the tree -- good God, the tree! The haziness was going away and he could see it more clearly now. The tree thrust upward from the ridge top, soaring far into the sky, not topping out, but continuing upward as far as he could see, the staircase winding round it, going up and up until the tree trunk and the staircase became one thin pencil line, then vanished in the blue.

Both those moments evoke that most hoary of science fiction virtues -- the sense of wonder. A little of which can make up for a great deal of what otherwise was a terrible waste of time.

Beginning writers should take note.

And since I was wrong...
I learned sometime after writing the above that Highway of Eternity is available as n e-book from Open Road Media, who also make available a great many other Simak books in e-form.

Friday, December 16, 2016

This year's Christmas chores have been tumbling one on top of another, so I'm running a little late today. Nevertheless, it's time to present my annual re-telling of
something that really did happen, exactly as I tell it here. This traditional Christmas tale I call...

The Parable of the Creche

When first I came to Roxborough, a third of a century ago,
the creche was already a tradition of long standing. Every year it
appeared in Gorgas Park during
the Christmas season. It wasn't all that
big -- maybe seven feet high at its tip -- and it wasn't very fancy. The figures of Joseph and Mary, the Christ
child, and the animals were a couple of feet high at best, and there
were
sheets of Plexiglas over the front of the wooden construction to keep
people
from walking off with them. But there was a painted backdrop of the
hills of Bethlehem at night, the floor was strewn was real straw, and it
was genuinely loved.

It was a common sight to see people standing before the
creche, especially at night, admiring it. Sometimes parents brought
their small children to see it for the first time and that was
genuinely touching. It provided a
welcome touch of seasonality and community to the park.

Alas, Gorgas Park was publicly owned, and it was only a
matter of time before somebody complained that the creche violated the
principle of the separation of church and state. When the complaint finally came, the creche
was taken out of the park and put into storage.

People were upset of course. Nobody liked seeing a beloved tradition disappear. There was a certain amount of grumbling and
disgruntlement.

So the kindly people of Leverington Presbyterian Church,
located just across the street from the park, stepped in. They adopted the creche and put it up on the
yard in front of their church, where it could be seen and enjoyed by all.

But did this make us happy?
It did not. The creche was just
not the same, located in front of a church.
It seemed lessened, in some strange way, made into a prop for the
Presbyterians. You didn’t see people
standing before it anymore.

I was in a local tappie shortly after the adoption and heard
one of the barflies holding forth on this very subject:

Thursday, December 15, 2016

I was in junior high school that I realized how easy it was to extrapolate the future. Coca-cola cost a penny an ounce then. Eight cents for an eight ounce bottle, a dime for a ten ounce bottle, and so on. Then the ten ounce bottles disappeared from the vending machines, replaced by eight ounce bottles -- still costing a dime. In a flash, I saw that the price of Coke would be twenty cents within the year and a quarter not long after. I told this to a friend and he said, "You're nuts!"

It all happened, of course.

Much later, when ATM machines first appeared, I read the description of how they worked and pondered how you could prevent someone from making a fake deposit into a nearly empty account and then withdrawing the same amount in cash. "Of course!" I thought. "They don't credit the deposit until they see it." It was blindingly obvious.

A week later, the newspaper recounted that the fancy new machines were being reprogrammed not to credit deposits until a human being had actually seen them. Because they had discovered that scammers were making fake deposits. That was when I realized how rare it is for people in authority to make even the simplest extrapolations of the future.

So it's not in the spirit of partisanship but in the spirit of the blindingly obvious that I want to look at the next American presidential election four years from now.

The CIA has stated that the Russian government interfered in the most recent election. Accounts vary at this point. They certainly hacked into DNC computers and leaked documents that either were doctored or didn't have to be. They seem to have sponsored a flood of very savvy fake news sites. Some even claim they monkeyed where they could with electronic voting machines. (This is trickier because many machines aren't linked to the Web, rendering them close to unhackable and those that are don't have a single unified system, making the prospect expensive. But, where it matters, the Kremlin has very deep pockets.)

I am wary of the CIA. But I believe them in this case for two reasons: 1) Trump will be the next President, no matter what; there's simply not enough time to put together a case that would make the Electoral College not appoint him. 2) If the CIA were lying, then they would be committing an act of treason -- something they must surely know the next administration would take unkindly.

So. Russia committed what might technically be called an act of war. Let's leave it to the historians to argue whether it worked or Trump would have won handily without it. The issues are bigger than that now.

Whatever the facts, the Russian bureaucracy is going to believe they turned the election. Why? Because they threw a lot of money at it and they have to justify the expenditures. The cyberwarriors of other nations are going to believe it too. Why? Because the stakes are too high not to.

Most likely nothing serious will happen to Russia as a result. This will send a message to the world.

The US is still the biggest, richest, most dangerous nation on Earth. Every nation has a stake in who sets its policies. So four years from now, we can pretty confidently expect China to involve its cyberwarriors even more heavily in the election than Russia did in this one. They'd be fools not to.

Other nations I'm not so sure about. Israel? India? Germany? Japan? Saudi Arabia? Realpolitik says they all should. Various considerations might hold some of them back. At least until the 2024 elections.

But we're facing the possibility of the first American election in which the voters are minority stakeholders.

And I want to emphasize...
I'm not arguing politics here. Just stating the obvious.

And tomorrow...

The return of a holiday tradition.

Above: Not necessarily the future US electorate.I took this image from Flagdivision.com. You can find their site and maybe buy a flag here.

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

My title above sounds frivolous, I admit, like something you might slap on the cover of a Lord of the Rings parody. But it neatly sums up a piece of good news for Samuel R. Delany's many admirers, particularly the well-heeled book collectors among them.

Delany's early science fiction trilogy, The Fall of the Towers, is being reissued by Centipede Press half a century after their original publication. It will be published in three distinct dustjacketed volumes, with all of the original forewords and afterwords, new artwork by David Ho, and an introduction by (cough) me.

Chip Delany was one of my earliest literary heroes and his work has never fallen in my esteem. So this was a pretty big deal for me.

Here's how my introduction begins:

Context is necessary. The nineteen year old who began
writing Out of the Dead City, the first volume of The Fall of the Towers,
lived in a country very different from the one we now inhabit. Men wore hats
and women petticoats. Computers were intimidating behemoths that filled rooms
and had laughably little processing power. Clothing, houses, and consumer
packaging were all much drabber than what we are now used to. Homosexuality was
thought of as a rare mental illness. People of color were treated as second-class
citizens.

There was nothing in any of the above to prevent
a young, queer Negro (these are the terms he himself would have used) from
deciding to write a trilogy of novels – or, rather, a novel in three books –
exploring the economic origins of war and the distorting effects it has on
society. But at a time when black SF writers did not advertise their race and
gay SF writers kept a lower profile than Delany was willing to do, it would
require moxie...

By necessity, the set is not exactly cheap. You can preorder one right now for $150. Which is not a bad price for three beautifully-made hardcover volumes issued in an edition of 300 copies each.

So either you need a set or you don't. If you're in the first category, you know who you are. If you're in the second, you can find the original paperbacks easily enough -- and they include Chip's l forewords and afterwords. I think I did a pretty good job with my own intro. But there's no getting around the fact that the single best explicator or Samuel R. Delany's fiction has always been the man himself.

Monday, December 5, 2016

I ran across this while going through some old papers. Believe it or not, there's a Kliban cartoon which, by changing a single name, neatly summarizes a classic Gardner Dozois story. So I made that change.And for no particular reason...My old buddy Mike Resnick (seven times voted Most Likely to Cheat Me Out of a Hugo) recently had this to say about Hugo Gernsback:

The first guy to define science fiction was Hugo Gernsback, the man who created the first all-science-fiction magazine (Amazing Stories, back
in April, 1926). He’s the guy our most prestigious award is named
after, even though he had some difficulty speaking English, clearly
couldn’t edit it, and usually refused to pay for it except on threat of
lawsuit.

You won't find a more succinct or accurate summation of the man than that!

Friday, December 2, 2016

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last... -- William Butler Yeats

Almost fifty years ago, in 1968, Pamela Zoline and John Sladek, with help from Thomas Disch, edited a one-shot poetry zine titled Ronald Reagan The Magazine of Poetry. It holds a certain place in our cultural memory if for no other reason than its including J. G. Ballard's scabrous masterpiece, "Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan."

Now, one 48-year gyre later, possibly out of jeu d'esprit, possibly out of simple naughtiness, Temporary Culture has published Donald Trump The Magazine of Poetry.
I was offered the opportunity to contribute but, not being a poet, didn't see a place for myself in the magazine's pages. But after the fact it occurred to me that something I wrote in college would have filled the bill quite nicely. Since the original magazine was a one-shot, it seems unlikely we'll ever see a second issue of its inspired offspring.

That being the case, I present my poem in its entirety below:

Envoi

Excuse me while I slit my

Collectors and patrons of poetry can find the ordering information here.

Above: Henry Wessells and accomplice celebrating the magazine's launch in New York City. Envoi is copyright 2016 by Michael Swanwick.